every day dude... i'm 30 now... started happening to me a few years ago... it's just getting worse... i'm trying to figure out how to make it work.

Seconded!

Working a plan to get the hell out of this "career" and get into a much more fulfilling mode. My kid is grown and on her own so the wife and I really dont need a big house, 3 cars, 3 TVs, satellite, internet, cell phones, and all of the other poo that is modern life.

I can grow a lot of the food we need on our 1 acre lot and the house is paid for so a couple decent part time gigs should be enough to take care of the necessities.

You guys go to the boonies and eat sticks and live in tents, leaving more stuff for me.

Win-win.

Was just thinking that....I know a lot of people are going into this mode right now and I get it and good for them but not me. I still need a freaking jetski, my Lexus sports car, hair gel, and high definition LED TVs.

Sure none of this will help me when the zombie apocolypse starts but as far as I am concerned, I hope to be one of the first to go when that day comes.

I do respect the people that go off and live the simple life in the middle of nowhere and I believe that they are happier for it. I'm just not wired that way.

On a sidenote, I have entertained the thought of living on a boat and fully intend to do so one day so maybe I am not that bad. When I do it though, will be docked at a place like The Peninsula Country Club on Lake Norman so I won't exactly be roughing it.

I know as I've gotten older I've gotten less materialistic. Not sure why that is, but I guess you get to a point in your life where you look at all the stuff you have, and wonder how it would be to live without all that stuff.

I doubt I'd ever go full Grizzly Adams, but I can see the allure of getting away from it all.

same poo here bronn, i've been down that road. i'm a bit younger than you (27 now) but the midlife crisis hit me at age 22. i grew up in a household of massively high expectations based entirely around financial success and social status. acquiring as much money as possible and attaining security and stability and status were the gods of my formative years. and so when my knees blew out and i got booted from the marines and dropped out of school and working in a goddamn fast food kitchen i dropped into a pretty deep existential crisis for a good long time. that's when i began to question the entire realm of ideology i'd been fed since childhood, and in an effort to escape it i basically did a brain dump and shoved aside all my preexisting notions about the world and what it meant to live and started over fresh. i spent probably a year straight in the guilford college library almost every night reading nothing but philosophy and theology and literature and science and geography and astronomy and everything else in an attempt to ingest as much knowledge as possible and to, at the same time, find my place in the universe, if i had one.

what happened was a gradual slide away from the grasp of materialism and the deadly clutches of western consumer culture. i began to see those things for the shadows they are rather than security they're propped up to be, and in the process of this paradigm shift i completely lost respect for death and for fear and for security and comfort, and in response i quit my job, sold the better part of my possessions, and bought a one-way ticket to australia. i wandered through australian wilderness and up into the jungles of southeast asia living out of an old external frame backpack and doing nothing but reading and writing and thinking and engaging in discourse with as many new people as i could encounter, seeking, in what was almost a spiritual experience - a pilgrimage of sorts, as i recognize it now to have been - the answers to life's greatest mysteries.

years later, in truth, i am no closer to arriving at those answers, and in fact the waters have been muddied quite considerably. the more i discover the more complex things become in my mind. but i am attempting to make a career out of pursuing those answers, and i have discovered a great many intangible things to find joy in this life, and now i'm married to someone who shares in the dream of creating a community property with the goal of bringing in orphans and foster care castoffs and caring for them, and enabling others on the property to accomplish great, world-changing goals by the support of the collective, financially and otherwise. it's that drive that keeps me working 60-70 hour workweeks along with full time school to make this a reality.

so... there comes a point when idealism meets reality, and of course you can't just up and fly to australia and leave your wife and kids behind. but maybe that longing in your heart can be fulfilled by finding an adventure, a deeper purpose, in life, one that goes beyond your mere existence. it's something to explore; maybe you'll like what you find.